John Wesley Funchess, 16 April 1931, Learned, Mississippi, USA, d. 1 February 1994, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Littlejohn taught himself to play guitar and was inspired by Henry Martin, a blues guitarist friend of his father. In 1946, he left home and was an itinerant worker before settling in Gary, Indiana, in 1951 and taking up the guitar seriously. He quickly became a popula
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Robert Lee Wilson, 11 July 1936, Glen Allan, Mississippi, USA. Wilson was eight when his father bought him his first guitar. His teenage years were spent developing his singing and playing skills. In 1961 he became a member of Junior Green And His Soul Searchers Band, which, after some years, he left to join Roosevelt Booba Barnes, with whom he played for four ye
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3 April 1970, Long Beach, California, USA. As a child Zinn listened to R&B and the blues on record and started out on his own musical career playing drums. By his late teens, however, he had taken up the guitar on which he quickly became proficient. Among guitarists who influenced him were Jimmy Rogers, Eddie Taylor and especially Luther Tucker, the latter eventually bec
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13 December 1958, Chicago, Illinois, USA. The second son of Carey Bell, Lurries musical interests were encouraged from an early age by his father and the guitarist Roy Johnson. By the age of eight Bell was regularly called onstage for guest appearances. In his teens he joined Koko Taylors band as guitarist. In the 80s he established himself as both a respected ba
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15 December 1955, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. Hummel was raised in Los Angeles, California, where as a child he became interested in blues rock as practised by contemporary popular rockers such as Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Rolling Stones. He had begun playing harmonica and gradually stretched his musical interests backwards in time to those artists who had inspired the bl
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Emery H. Williams Jnr., 26 October 1931, Haynes, Arkansas, USA, d. 9 August 2005, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Blues pianist Junior became interested in music in the mid-40s. In the early 50s, as a pianist and band leader, he had a residency in a Detroit club where he backed artists such as Rosco Gordon and Amos Milburn, the latter greatly influencing his songwriting. Eddie Boyd
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17 August 1936, Edes, Tennessee, USA. Jones is one of the most respected of a clutch of blues artists who have found themselves a niche in the country-dominated musical climate of Nashville, Tennessee. A fixture at local clubs with his band the Imperial Seven, by the 80s his musical ambitions had been subsumed by financial considerations, and he can still be found running hi
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Big Twist (Larry Nolan, 23 September 1937, Terra Haute, Indiana, USA, d. 14 March 1990, Broadview, Illinois, USA) was the lead singer and leader of this R&B big band. He began singing in church in southern Illinois when he was six years old, and in the 50s was drummer and vocalist with the Mellow Fellows, an R&B group. In the early 70s he teamed with guitarist Pete S
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1959, New Orleans, USA. As an amateur blues singer he discovered plenty of musical opportunities in the region, occasionally adding guitar and sometimes clarinet accompaniment to impromptu bar-room sessions. The citys music circuit of that time demanded singers capable of copycat renditions of standards such as Hoochie Coochie Man and Dust My Broom
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Emmitt Ellis Jnr., 10 November 1936, Homer, Louisiana, USA. For most of his career, Rush has managed to forge an amalgam of blues, soul and R&B which allows him the widest scope for personal expression.The son of a preacher, he began performing in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, with a band that included guitarist Boyd Gilmore and Johnny Big Moose
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Edward Taylor, c. 1971, Chicago, Illinois, USA. His father, Eddie Taylor, played blues guitar and sang mainly in Chicago and was for some years a valued sideman in Jimmy Reeds band. Taylor Jnr. also took up guitar, teaching himself to play on an old instrument discarded by his father. Playing and singing contemporary Chicago blues, Taylor gradually developed his own n
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21 July 1917, Marianna, Arkansas, USA, d. 19 December 1989, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Brought up in the Mississippi Delta, Jones had been playing guitar for some years by the time he settled in Chicago around 1945. He soon became part of a seminal group of musicians that had come up from the south and who were in the process of developing the new electric Chicago blues sound.
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